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The Citizen
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Citizen
Roblox Exposed: Risks to children playing Roblox concerning
Roblox acknowledges that children using the platform may be exposed to harmful content and 'bad actors'. A child's avatar enters a virtual bedroom and joins others in sexually suggestive animations. No alarms. No filters. Just another day on Roblox – a platform used by over 85 million people daily, more than 40% of whom are under the age of 13. As Roblox faces mounting criticism for exposing children to explicit content and online predators, the cracks in modern parental control systems are becoming harder to ignore. Parents concerns This comes as parents shared their serious concerns about children experiencing addiction, seeing traumatising content and being approached by strangers on the hugely popular website and app. Early parental controls were simple filters designed to block explicit content. Today's monitoring tools and screen‑time limits still lag behind the pace of online innovation. Roblox has become a focal point: investigations uncovered a 10‑year‑old's avatar entering virtual spaces featuring a female avatar wearing fishnet stockings gyrating on a bed with sexualized dance avatars, and voice chats sometimes circulate explicit language despite AI moderation. ALSO READ: Assassin's Creed Shadows transports gamers to feudal Japan Harmful content Roblox acknowledges that children using the platform may be exposed to harmful content and 'bad actors'. The company said it is working hard to fix this, but that industry-wide collaboration and government intervention are needed. However, Damon De Ionno of Revealing Reality observed that the new safety features announced by Roblox last week don't go far enough. 'Children can still chat with strangers, not on their friends list'. Parental control Experts and parents agree that today's parental controls are falling behind. Despite updates platforms still allow children to interact with strangers and access misrated content. Parents report feeling overwhelmed by inconsistent safety tools that are hard to customize and easy to bypass. A Mobile Premier League (MPL) spokesperson noted that the digital spaces kids use today are fast-moving and social. 'Safety needs to be built in at the design stage, not added later. Controls must be flexible, proactive, and truly protective. Effective regulation of digital environments is essential to protect young players and ensure safer gaming communities.' Children's online behaviour According to MPL, the problems highlighted by the Roblox case are not limited to one platform. They reveal a deeper, system-wide failure of parental controls that have not evolved alongside children's online behaviour. It said that real-time monitoring, customizable safety settings, and standardised protections across platforms are essential for meaningful safety. 'To protect young users, technology companies, regulators, and child safety advocates must collaborate on smarter, more consistent solutions.' Creating safer digital spaces requires more than patchwork fixes, MPLA said, 'it demands a unified and proactive approach'. ALSO READ: Why playing video games might be the best thing for your brain
The Guardian
14-04-2025
- The Guardian
Risks to children playing Roblox ‘deeply disturbing', say researchers
'Deeply disturbing' research exposes how easy it is for children to encounter inappropriate content and interact unsupervised with adults on the gaming platform Roblox. It comes as parents shared their serious concerns about children experiencing addiction, seeing traumatising content and being approached by strangers on the hugely popular website and app. Roblox acknowledges that children using the platform may be exposed to harmful content and 'bad actors'. It says it is working hard to fix this, but that industry-wide collaboration and government intervention are needed. Describing itself as 'the ultimate virtual universe', Roblox features millions of games and interactive environments, known collectively as 'experiences'. Some of the content is developed by Roblox, but much of it is user-generated. In 2024, the platform had more than 85 million daily active users, an estimated 40% of whom are under 13. While the company said it 'deeply sympathised' with parents whose children came to harm on the platform, it said 'tens of millions of people have a positive, enriching and safe experience on Roblox every day'. However, in an investigation shared with the Guardian, the digital-behaviour experts Revealing Reality discovered 'something deeply disturbing … a troubling disconnect between Roblox's child-friendly appearance and the reality of what children experience on the platform'. Revealing Reality created multiple Roblox accounts, registering them to fictional users aged five, nine, 10, 13 and 40-plus. The accounts interacted only with one another, and not with users outside the experiment, to ensure their avatars' behaviours were not influenced in any way. Despite new tools launched last week aimed at giving parents more control over their children's accounts, the researchers concluded: 'Safety controls that exist are limited in their effectiveness and there are still significant risks for children on the platform.' The report found that children as young as five were able to communicate with adults while playing games on the platform, and found examples of adults and children interacting with no effective age verification. This was despite Roblox changing its settings last November so that accounts listed as belonging to under-13s can no longer directly message others outside of games or experiences, instead having access only to public broadcast messages. The report also found the avatar belonging to the 10-year-old's account could access 'highly suggestive environments'. These included a hotel space where they could view a female avatar wearing fishnet stockings gyrating on a bed and other avatars lying on top of each other in sexually suggestive poses, and a public bathroom space where characters were urinating and avatars could choose fetish accessories to dress up in. Researchers found that their test avatars overheard conversations between other players verbalising sexual activity, as well as repeated slurping, kissing and grunting noises, when using the voice chat function. Roblox says that all voice chat – which is available to phone-verified accounts registered as belonging to users aged 13 and above – is subject to real-time AI moderation. They also found that a test avatar registered to an adult was able to ask for the five-year-old test avatar's Snapchat details using barely coded language. Though Roblox says in-game text chat is subject to built-in filters and moderation, the report says this is an example of how easily such measures can be circumvented, creating opportunities for predatory behaviour. Sign up to Pushing Buttons Keza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gaming after newsletter promotion Roblox said it recognised 'there are bad actors on the internet' but added this was 'an issue that goes beyond Roblox and needs to be addressed through collaboration with governments and an industry-wide commitment to strong safety measures across all platforms'. It also acknowledged that age verification for under-13s 'remains an industry challenge'. Stories shared by parents following a Guardian Community callout include that of a 10-year-old boy who was groomed by an adult he met on the platform, and a nine-year-old girl who started having panic attacks after seeing sexual content while gaming. Damon De Ionno, the research director of Revealing Reality, said: 'The new safety features announced by Roblox last week don't go far enough. Children can still chat with strangers not on their friends list, and with 6 million experiences [on the platform], often with inaccurate descriptions and ratings, how can parents be expected to moderate?' The crossbench peer and internet safety campaigner Beeban Kidron said the research exposed the platform's 'systematic failure to keep children safe', adding: 'This kind of user research should be routine for a product like Roblox.' Matt Kaufman, the chief safety officer at Roblox, said: 'Trust and safety are at the core of everything we do. We continually evolve our policies, technologies, and moderation efforts to protect our community, especially young people. This includes investing in advanced safety tools, working closely with experts and empowering parents and caregivers with robust controls and resources. 'In 2024 alone, we added more than 40 new safety enhancements, and we remain fully committed to going further to make Roblox a safe and civil place for everyone.'
The Guardian
14-04-2025
- The Guardian
‘A man approached him': parents describe their children's Roblox problems
David, a 46-year-old father from Calgary, Canada, initially did not see a problem when his 10-year-old son started to play on Roblox, the platform of user-generated games and virtual environments that has exploded in popularity in recent years, particularly among younger gamers. 'We saw it as a way for him to maintain a level of social interaction during the Covid lockdowns,' David said, assuming his son was using the platform's chat function only to speak with friends he knew personally. After a while, his parents found him speaking to someone in his room in the middle of the night. 'We discovered that a man from India had approached him on Roblox and coached him to bypass our internet security controls,' David said. 'This person then persuaded my son to take compromising nude images and videos of himself and send them via our Google Mini. 'It was hard to get to the root of why my son did that. I think he was lonely, thought this was a genuine friend, and we think he was given gifts on Roblox that made him feel special. It was really every parent's worst nightmare.' David was among parents from around the world who shared with the Guardian that their children, often of primary school age, had been profoundly negatively affected by gaming on Roblox or had come to serious harm. Many also confirmed the findings of a report last year that claimed Roblox was exposing children to grooming, pornography, violent content and abusive speech. Although some parents said Roblox had been a creative outlet for their children, brought them joy or even improved some of their skills, such as communication and spelling, the vast majority of parents who got in touch expressed severe concerns. These were mostly about staggering levels of addiction they had observed in their children, but also about instances of traumatising content in games their children could access despite parental controls, grooming, emotional blackmail, bullying, extreme political imagery such as avatars in Nazi uniforms, and strangers talking inappropriately to their children on the platform. 'Deeply disturbing' research by the digital behaviour experts Revealing Reality found children as young as five were able to communicate with adults while playing games on the platform. Roblox acknowledged in response that children playing on the platform may be exposed to harmful content and 'bad actors', an issue the company claimed it was working hard to fix but that required industry-wide collaboration and government intervention. While the company said it 'deeply sympathise[d]' with parents whose children have had negative experiences on Roblox, it did not engage with parental concerns about child users experiencing severe gaming addiction. A freshly announced series of additional safety tools, aimed at giving greater flexibility to parents to manage their children's activity on the site, failed to convince many of the parents the Guardian spoke to. 'I don't think the changes will address my concerns,' said Emily, a mother from Hemel Hempstead. 'The new features are helpful but won't stop the children being able to access inappropriate or scary content. People are allowed to choose the age ratings of a game they've created and they will not always be appropriate or accurate. I don't think Roblox does enough to guarantee the safety of younger children on the platform.' Her seven-year-old daughter, she said, was having trouble sleeping as a Roblox game had taken her to a room with an avatar that was introduced as 'your dad' and then shot dead. Despite Roblox claiming it had introduced 'new easy-to-use 'remote management' parental controls', parents said they had found it extremely difficult to navigate the parental control settings, and said it would take hours to regularly review their child's activity. It was also impossible to tell, many stressed, who was really behind a user name. 'Although Roblox do monitor the type of language being used, such as profanity, there is no real way of policing the age of players and some users talk in code,' said a mother from Rhondda Cynon Taff, Wales, whose autistic seven-year-old son plays on Roblox regularly. The company stressed that it had made it a default setting last year that under 13s can no longer directly message others on Roblox outside of games or experiences. Roblox admitted however that it was struggling to verify the age of users, saying that 'age verification for users under the age of 13 remains a wider industry challenge'. Nelly*, a mother from Dublin in her 40s, said her nine-year-old daughter had just finished a course of play therapy to process sexual content she saw on Roblox that triggered panic attacks. 'I thought it was OK to play,' she said. 'I also didn't allow her to befriend strangers. I thought this was enough but it wasn't. 'There was an area that she went into and people wore underwear and someone came in and lay down on her.' Many parents felt Roblox was exploiting children's 'underdeveloped impulse control', as one father put it, giving them constant nudges to gamble and stay on the platform, and prompting many children to lose interest in other activities in the real world. Jenna, from Birmingham, said two months after her children had started playing Roblox, their 'whole lives [had] been taken over' by the platform, echoing the remarks of scores of other parents. 'I feel like I'm living with two addicts,' she said. 'If they aren't playing, they want to watch videos about it … When they get told to come off it's like you're cutting them off from their last fix – shouting, arguments, sometimes pure rage.' Peter, 51, an artist from London and father of three boys, said his 14-year-old son had become so addicted to Roblox and his devices generally that he had become violent, and had on one occasion broken a window with his fist when the game had been switched off. 'The people who run Roblox don't give a shit that parents can't control the game. We've tried everything and nothing has worked. We're now in therapy,' he said. Roblox's chief executive has advised parents to keep their kids off the platform if they feel worried. Maria, a mother of three from Berkshire, was among many who highlighted, however, that it was difficult for parents to do so as children felt socially excluded when they were offline, and that the platform's monetisation elements – unlocking higher game levels and personalisation features – had become status symbols among children. Roblox said in a statement: 'We deeply sympathise with the parents who described theirs and their kids' negative experiences on Roblox. This is not what we strive for, and not reflective of the civil online space we want to build for everyone. 'Tens of millions of people have a positive, enriching and safe experience on Roblox every day, in a supportive environment that promotes connecting with friends, learning and developing vital STEM skills. While we recognise that no safety system operating at scale is perfect, we work tirelessly to enhance and improve our systems, processes and policies.' *Name has been changed
The Guardian
16-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Many young people find safety in the soothing world of ASMR – imagine if we could give them that in the real world
You wouldn't think a deep dive on slime-squishing and head-scratching videos could be haunting, but a recent study on ASMR content left me haunted and also slightly grossed out. ASMR, for those not particularly online, is a content genre named after the feeling it provokes in some viewers: autonomous sensory meridian response, a pseudoscientific name for a pleasurable tingling accompanied by a sense of calm. If you're moderately online, you may know it as 'those whispering and tapping videos' – there is lots of that, plus scratching, slime and gentle brushing. But there is much more to it, as I discovered reading a report by innovation agency Revealing Reality, including subgenres that mimic physical touch. You can watch ASMR-ists pretend to brush your hair, groom you for nits or wipe your 'face' – the camera – with a spit-moistened finger (that is the gross bit). Many of ASMR's young consumers say they watch to soothe feelings of being overwhelmed by the outside world. A subset described other feelings the videos gave them: solace, safety and the sensations they associate with being loved. One fan explained that her mum used to give her nightly head massages; now, watching head-scratching videos helped her sleep. 'People like to feel taken care of,' a creator theorised. We all get calm and comfort from different things (crisps and chickens here), but we're creatures who need physical connection; we're mammals, primates. It feels a bit melancholy, young people using YouTube to conjure the feeling of intimate gestures of love and care and connection, seeking what the report calls a 'digital response to fundamental human needs … that previously would have been met through embodied experiences'. I found myself wondering what 'embodied experiences' I would like to recreate. The first that came to mind related to our dog, who died 18 months ago: rubbing the floppy silk of his ears between finger and thumb; cupping my palm over the dome of his anxious little skull with thumb and middle finger; stroking the bald patches behind his ears; scratching his back on the spot just in front of his rear legs that made him reflexively paw the air. Looking at pictures of him conjured other sense memories: the roughness of his pink and black paw pads; running my hands along the swooping curve of his hairless belly; fluffing the rosette on his chest where the hair whorled in different directions with a fingertip. I can still remember how that felt, just. Then there are bigger, headier, physical sensations around my sons' birth and infancy; you're never more animal than at those times. I remember the astonishing slither of a heel along my lower ribs from the inside; how the sudden, comic poke of a sharp elbow felt. I would give a lot to feel, just momentarily, that singular joy of being inhabited. I'd love to relive my now-huge younger son curled against my shoulder after a feed, my palm spanning his back, massaging an air bubble through his still-shrimpy newborn body. But all that stuff is gone: baths and hair washes; feeling hot wriggly bodies slip into stillness as they fell asleep against me. It's not just the kids: there is the way an intensely anticipated first kiss felt both inevitable and absolutely surprising. Never again will I feel the bulletproof exhilaration of galloping across moorland, pony sweat and peat in my nostrils, to a soundtrack of curlews and lapwings – too old, too scared. My mum was small but her love felt gigantic. When I try to conjure what it felt like to hold my cheek against her very soft one, I can almost get there, but not quite. That is sad, but it is OK. Physical sensations are powerful and precious because they are finite; no ASMR alchemy or immersive VR experience could come close to recreating them, and I would far rather have the memory than an ersatz version anyway. We live and feel those moments, then we honour them and keep them alive by missing how they felt. But we also keep holding, touching the people and creatures we love, and that means we are always laying down new sense memories of connection. Maybe someone should be whispering that? Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Telegraph
10-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Why thousands of people are watching videos of someone squeezing slime
'We were talking about the anxiety, you know, the intense anxiety of daily life, or life things,' whispers a young American woman as she gently wafts a make-up brush across the screen, taking a second to click long, manicured fingernails against its shaft. Via a powerful microphone, I can hear every squelch of saliva as she speaks, every thrum of her lips rubbing across each other, every pop and click of plosive and velar consonants. 'You're going to be okay,' she continues, though, I'm not sure I feel the same watching this. Perhaps that's my age showing. According to a new report from behavioural insights agency Revealing Reality, Gen Z are obsessed with this type of video. Carefully crafted to provoke ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) – a neurological reaction beginning with a tingling across the scalp, which moves downwards through the shoulders and spine – these videos aim to relax and soothe viewers. ASMR videos take various forms, from hands squishing blobs of slime, to cooking, to the sound of hearts beating, to people playing with hair or conducting to-camera health check-ups, and dozens of permutations thereof. What they tend to have in common is that they're quiet, using high-quality microphones to pick up even the tiniest sounds. According to YouTube, 'ASMR' was the single most searched term of 2024 with millions of videos on that platform as well as TikTok and Instagram Reels. Revealing Reality's report found 30 per cent of 18-24-year-olds often watch slime-squeezing videos compared to just one percent of over-65s who said the same. Revealing Reality suggests the videos could be serving the needs of young adults in ways reality can't. In a world where people 'shun the messy unpredictability of in-person interaction and try to meet all their human needs through a screen' is ASMR able to provide a solution for our fundamental human needs of intimacy, comfort, and sensory stimulation? I watched a series of ASMR videos to see what effect, if any, they would have on me… Touch Revealing Reality's report highlights a few examples of the different 'genres' of ASMR. The first is the tactile: people squishing slime between their fingers, chopping blocks of kinetic sand, or cooking. They're bright, colourful and make you want to reach out and get involved. For me, these videos were the most visually entertaining. Watching hands squeeze colourful putty, stretching it out, rolling it between their fingers. It's visceral and satisfying. There's something hypnotic about them, I found myself leaning in to hear the pop as the disembodied digits squeeze an air bubble out of the colourful goo. 'Touch is a critical aspect of ASMR videos,' says Joydeep Bhattacharya, professor of psychology at Goldsmith's University who studies ASMR. 'Skin is our largest organ, humans crave touch. It's notable ASMR videos became much more popular during lockdown when we were craving physical touch we couldn't get. These videos tap into a social cue which our brains associate with emotional regulation and relaxation.' For those who experience ASMR these videos provoke a specific reaction, says Professor Bhattacharya. 'Alpha-waves [an electrical pattern where neurons fire together] in certain brain regions are increased,' he says. 'That's an indicator of a more relaxed and flow-like state. Beta waves are also activated in the visual cortex. Those put the brain in a state of relaxation but also alertness. The videos and sounds also involve the reward circuitry of the brain, giving a hit of pleasure. There is a brain network called default mode network which is used when we think about ourselves. That network is reduced by ASMR so we become less anxious.' It soon becomes clear that I'm not one of the 20 per cent who experience ASMR (possibly a good thing. According to Professor Bhattacharya, those who do are often 'individuals with high neuroticism and high sensory processing sensitivity' – Revealing Reality links this to younger generations' over-reliance on noise-cancelling headphones and feelings of overwhelm associated with in-person interactions) but tactile ASMR is satisfying to watch. Intense personal attention Coming in the form of a seemingly endless parade of young American women whispering about how beautiful and special I am, I didn't vibe with this genre of ASMR. If the goal was Make Americans Grate Again, this genre does so with aplomb. There was something vaguely unsettling about the woman who punctuated all her hushed sentences with hissing pops and repetitions of 'c' sounds. I watched a man whispering me through his Pokémon card collection, then a lady cooing over a new Samsung phone. Hold your phone up to your face and they could almost be a video-call, albeit one-sided. You feel as though you're the centre of their world, with all their attention lavished upon you. Be warned, though, there are a few grisly sub-genres. I discovered the ' spit-painting' sub-genre which sees ASMRtists wiping their saliva over the camera and microphone while smacking their lips. Without wishing to yuck anyone's yum, I was thoroughly disgusted. Again, these videos are designed to tap into a specific social cue, says Professor Bhattacharya. 'Think about it: who whispers to you?' he asks. 'A friend sharing a secret and putting their trust in you. We're social creatures, so these videos create a prolonged environment of cues, which we value highly. That creates these comfortable, safe environments. In whispered videos, there's vicariousness; as if you're close to someone.' Grooming Combining both aforementioned genres; a great deal of ASMR videos involve grooming. That might be listening to the gentle brushstrokes of someone applying make-up, or even watching them roleplaying as a doctor or hairdresser working on you. One invited me to pretend to be a robot while the ASMRtist gave me a tune-up. According to Revealing Reality, a third of ASMR videos on YouTube and TikTok mention words relating to personal care or beauty, and a quarter involve medical checks. If any of this sounds a bit like soft-core pornography, by the way, that's not unintentional. 'When ASMR videos started most early videos were adult content,' explains Professor Bhattacharya. 'That has changed over time, but the brain response suggests that certain reward circuitry gets activated by ASMR in the same way as they get rewarded when watching adult content. Ultimately, the brain and body's responses to ASMR is to give feelings of relaxation and comfort. Whether there's a strong overlap between that and pornography, we don't have the research to say, but I wouldn't be surprised.' However, the hair-care and medical check-up genre of ASMR may also have a more innocuous evolutionary origin. Look no further than our closest primate relatives: they groom each other to socialise and show affection. We know scalp stimulation causes the brain to release endorphins, particularly oxytocin, a hormone related to feelings of affection. In an increasingly online world, perhaps grooming videos allow us to vicariously feel a sense of closeness to other people we don't get in reality. Notably, Revealing Reality's survey found 22 per cent of people said they preferred chatting to people online rather than face-to-face. However, Professor Bhattacharya warns that indulging in ASMR to fulfil these gaps in our socialising needs may be unhealthy in the long term. 'We have to deal with anxiety rather than going for another ASMR video,' he says. 'Creating a dependency is not great.' Sound While sound is a huge part of all ASMR videos, some are specifically focused on pleasant noises. I was particularly enamoured by a YouTube channel called ' Wood Soup Girl ' who fills bowls with water and wooden blocks, then gently stirs them. Binaural audio makes you feel like the sounds of the gently clacking blocks and dripping water is flowing through your brain. It's easy to fall into an ultra-relaxed flow state, to the point that a colleague tapped me on the shoulder to check if I was still conscious. 'It's a very artificial environment,' Professor Bhattacharya comments. 'In the cooking ones, they cook very slowly and never deal with pans bubbling over or whatever. Most ASMR videos are displaying real actions, but in a way that doesn't happen in reality. They're often very slow and methodical which makes them relaxing.' If that all sounds a bit silly to you, it might be your age, Professor Bhattacharya goes on. 'I think younger generations have more affinity towards the online environment, and are more receptive to artificially constructed environments,' he says. 'Elder generations might experience something of the uncanny valley here. We know that older people have less preference towards artificial environments. That initial response colours everything.' While I can't say that any of the videos managed to give me that elusive ASMR response myself, I am closer to understanding the appeal. In a world where my brain often feels like it's on fire, diving between different computer tabs, flicking back and forth between apps, and texting three people at once, there's something quite soothing about being totally immersed in something where sound, visuals, and people are all entirely focused on me.
